


Somerset, Pennsylvania

by infectedsense



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alcohol, Bottom Dean, Dean-Centric, M/M, One Night Stands, implied one-sided attraction on dean's part, implied wincest, spoilers up to 9x01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-18
Updated: 2014-05-18
Packaged: 2018-01-25 13:53:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1650989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/infectedsense/pseuds/infectedsense
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“So what is it? Work? Family?”</i>
</p><p>
  <i>“A little of both,” Dean admitted before he could stop himself. Pausing to peel at a loose corner of the label on his beer bottle. “Actually, a lot of both.”</i>
</p><p>
  <i>“Family business?” the bartender asked, and Dean almost choked.</i>
</p><p>Set during the start of 5x03 Free To Be You And Me, when Dean and Sam are working apart. Almost canon compliant but not quite. Wincest if you squint.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Somerset, Pennsylvania

There was a bloodstain on the collar of Dean’s jacket and he knew it was there. As he walked, his fingers kept creeping up to it, running over the texture of the fabric where it changed from soft to brittle with the dark red dried into it, as if it were a good luck charm. Probably the opposite, Dean thought, catching himself with a flash of hot anger and forcing his hand back down to his side.

It hadn’t been the most challenging hunt he’d ever faced, not by a long shot. Not physically, at least. Vamps were easy. They were predictable. The important thing had been to cover his tracks, clean up his mess and make sure that he was untraceable. It had worked in Dean’s favour that these particular freaks had been off the grid for years. Even if the bodies were found, which Dean very much doubted, there would be little chance of turning up a positive ID on any of them. Even if there had been a witness. Even if traces of blood were found. Most of it had gotten on Dean himself and on Baby. It was all washed clean. Apart from this one damn stain.

Dean should have been on the road hours ago; sunset was barely three hours away. He had overslept, and badly. He had slept like the dead. By the time he’d woken up it had been well past noon and his stomach had felt like it was trying to eat itself. He’d woken up with a jump, arms out to protect his face on instinct before he remembered where he was and noticed the sunlight streaming over the bed clothes that had been kicked off of the bed and onto the floor. He’d slept with his boots on. The motel pillows were on the floor, too. He’d checked the time on his wristwatch and paused, considering. He would need to eat before he started driving anywhere; it had been almost twenty four hours since he last had. Even if he grabbed a burger from a drive thru, it would still add time. Once he left Somerset it would only be highway, black and endless. He’d end up driving through the night. He’d done that a thousand times before, but right then he didn’t want to.

He could handle the motels. He could handle the cases. There were enough distractions; playing at being a detective, keeping track of the details of victims, witnesses, police officers and hospital staff, constantly running through what he knew and where he would have to be careful. Who he could count on and who to avoid. Always focusing on not drawing any undue attention, any more than he had to in order to get the job done. And then of course there was the hunt. The deliberate organisation and counting of his impressive stock of weaponry before heading out, the methodical tracking of the target, and the relief of the kill. Those were all the things that he’d been practising his whole life, those were the things that Dean was built for.

But being out on the road with an empty passenger seat and no good radio station within range, just the purr of the engine and the wind whipping past. That was the part that Dean was no good at.

So he’d sat up in bed, sifting through his options. And he’d chosen to stay in town another day.

There had also been the fact of having nowhere in mind to drive to. Finding cases wasn’t his strong suit. If Bobby didn’t call him with a lead, or if Sam didn’t—

There was no reason for Dean to leave Somerset just yet. There was bound to be a decent diner in town.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

He was wrong about finding a decent diner. He hadn’t noticed it when he’d rolled through two days ago, but Somerset, Pennsylvania was not a pleasant town. Dean had been hunting just outside of Greeley, but the closest motel that he could afford had been the next town over, in Somerset. The affordability really should have tipped him off, but two days ago Dean had felt like his head wasn’t on anywhere near straight, and nothing had registered. He’d been walking up the driveway of a far nicer hotel in Greeley when he’d realised he’d been so focussed on getting there that he hadn’t stopped to hustle any pool or find some other way of making fast cash. He was here now, and it was too late. He might have been seen already, and his car certainly would have. He couldn’t risk blowing his cover, so the cash in his pockets would have to be enough. That meant no nice hotel on this one, not if he planned on eating or drinking while he was here. And if there was one thing he was damn well sure he would be doing before he left town, it was drinking.

Plan had been to grab a bottle of something cheap and nasty before the hunt and stash it in his motel room, drink himself to sleep, but Dean’s life never went according to the plan, not even the stupid little details like this. He’d spent his first morning suited up in fed mode, and the dumb sons of bitches had started killing again that afternoon. They hadn’t even waited until sundown. They must have been half-crazy with bloodlust to risk it, and it had slashed Dean’s timeframe for the case from an estimated three or four days of investigation to as fast as he could take the suckers down, which turned out to be eighteen hours. He hadn’t allowed himself the luxury of stopping in between kills. But it turned out that he didn’t need the stuff, after all. He’d slept for damn near ten hours straight.

Now that the day had been saved and he’d shed his false identity like a second skin, there was cash just burning a hole in Dean’s pocket. Before he left he could try and run a scam in Somerset but truth be told, sitting in a diner with streaked windows and barely clean coffee cups if his was anything to judge by, there wasn’t much money here at all. All that he had was time to kill until Thursday turned into Friday and he could drive again without having to drive through the night. A greasy Monte Cristo sandwich sitting heavy against his stomach lining, Dean had shrugged on his jacket and headed in search of a bar.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

What little light there was left in the day as it dragged towards evening was almost entirely absent inside the place, which, according to lettering on the wall to Dean’s right, was known as Joe’s Spot. Windows along the front wall were covered with blinds that were doing their best to maintain the darkness; daylight struggled weakly through their slats and seemed to give up almost immediately upon encountering the beer-soaked air within. Dean sighed long and deep, letting his shoulders drop, realising how much tension he had been holding there. It was definitely time for something cold.

His steps echoed on the wooden floor, just slightly louder than the twangy country music drifting from the jukebox. Around the space, eight or nine men sat, some in conversation, some alone. Dean figured that the only women who ever walked through the door were of a very specific type. The bar seemed like the kind of place that the sad and lonely went to make themselves feel even worse. The kind of place that Dean normally sought out, in fact, whenever Sam was off on his own and he needed to drink until that fact stopped bothering him.

“What’ll you have?” the bartender greeted him as soon as he laid a hand on the bar. He clearly wasn’t rushed off of his feet, aimlessly toying with a bar rag between long fingers as he met Dean’s eye with a smile of the type that Dean was well used to wearing on his own face; only the illusion of kindness. Dean nodded in return.

“Domestic, cheapest you’ve got.”

Dean got plenty of change from a ten and settled his weight into a bar stool, taking a long and grateful pull from the bottle that ended with a smack of his lips as they disengaged. Relief washed through him just at the taste of the beer, promising him that he could lose himself for an hour, two, three. Just for a little while, he could pretend that he didn’t have the weight of the world on his shoulders in an entirely too literal sense. For as long as he had cash in his pockets and as long as this place was open, he could forget that he was Dean Winchester.

He was on his third bottle, staring without interest at the television screen above the bar set to ESPN Classics, when a voice broke through the emptiness he’d allowed his mind to settle into.

“Rough day?” The bartender was leaning back against the shelves behind the bar, arms crossed over his broad frame that obscured the labels on the whiskey bottles behind him. Dean blinked. Now that he stopped to notice, the guy was unnaturally tall.

“You could say that,” he muttered darkly, wondering what it was about his defensive posture and scowling face that gave the impression that he was looking for a conversation. He just wanted to be alone. But the bartender smiled as if reading his thoughts.

“I’ve been doing this enough years to know when someone really needs to talk. You might not think you do but trust me. It always helps.”

“No offence pal, but I’m not exactly the sharing and caring type, alright?” Dean snapped, scowl deepening.

“Who said anything about caring?” came the reply, and in spite of himself, Dean had to smile. The bartender took a step forward and shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

“So what is it? Work? Family?”

“A little of both,” Dean admitted before he could stop himself. Pausing to peel at a loose corner of the label on his beer bottle. “Actually, a lot of both.”

“Family business?” the bartender asked, and Dean almost choked. “It can be pretty tough, right?”

“Understatement.” Dean recovered his composure and studied the man he was talking to. His hunter senses weren’t flaring, and even three beers deep he was normally pretty good at separating the human from the not-so-human. There was nothing about the guy that suggested he was anything other than he appeared to be; just some anonymous dark haired man in a black hoodie and faded blue jeans, killing time between customers. And yet, Dean felt gooseflesh rise on the insides of his arms. The instinct to spill his guts to this stranger was getting harder to fight, and it was unnerving. Winchesters weren’t raised to talk, they were raised to fight. But after taking care of the vamps over in Greeley, right now there was nothing to fight. Oversleeping had eaten into Dean’s research time, too. Not that he was any good at it.

“Who is it you’re working with? Father, brother?” the stranger asked him, picking up his bar rag and twisting it as he spoke. It was a nervous habit that seemed at odds with the soft, steady timbre of his voice. Dean wasn’t in the mood to talk and he knew that even if he was, he could never be honest with anyone. It was just the nature of the game. But even so, he found himself replying.

“My brother. Well, normally. He took off around a week ago. Things are…complicated right now.”

The bartender nodded with sympathy, then motioned to the now empty bottle in Dean’s hand. “Get you another?”

“Lord, yes.”

He lingered after he’d set the bottle down, head tilted, eyes flickering over Dean’s face in a way that should have had his hackles up. Maybe it was the beer or the dimness of his surroundings or the soft strains of Patsy Cline in the background, but for once Dean didn’t feel threatened. He just felt tired. When the bartender offered his hand, Dean took it.

“I’m Danny.”

“Dean.”

Danny nodded and leant forward against the bar, hands braced to take his weight. “It’s good to meet you, Dean.”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Within the next hour, Dean was drinking whiskey chasers alongside the beer, sliding a thumb around the rim of the glass as he spoke.

"It’s a pretty interesting town you have here.”

“I appreciate the sarcasm. I actually haven’t been here too long myself.”

“How long?”

“Six months or so, maybe seven.”

Dean thought about Sam, out on his own somewhere in the westward vastness of the United States, wondering if he’d washed up in a place like this himself. “What are you running from?” he said. Danny smiled.

“What gave me away?”

“Trust me,” Dean replied, holding eye contact. “I’ve been doing what I do enough years to know, too.” He figured it must be getting dark outside by now, but he couldn’t tell from inside. Sam must be in a different time zone. Maybe he was only just waking up.

“You willing to tell me what it is that you do?” Danny asked. Dean briefly debated changing the subject, but in the end kept it simple.

“No.”

“That’s fair.” Danny walked to the other end of the bar to serve a greying man in paint stained overalls and Dean watched him walk. He swayed almost like he was dancing, slowly. As soon as he’d served the customer he drifted back, smiling again.

“Do we have any safe topics of conversations here, you reckon?”

Dean shrugged. “There’s always baseball.”

And Danny laughed.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

“Every day. Mostly it’s just me here.”

“So how many hours you putting in?”

“How many hours in a day?” Danny deadpanned. Dean glanced at the sign on the wall.

“So where’s Joe?”

“Long dead, I reckon.”

“You own this place, Danny?”

He snorted. “No, sir. Just make a living here, that’s all.”

Dean cocked his head towards the mostly empty tables. “Some living.”

“This place won’t be open much longer, I can guarantee you that much.” The thought made Dean inexplicably sad. Nothing in this world could be permanent, it seemed. Good or bad, on a long enough timeline everything came to an end eventually.

“So where will you go when it does? You’re not from Pennsylvania.”

“No flies on you.” Dean snorted. “Kansas boy, born and raised.”

“Huh.” Dean raised his eyebrows as he fiddled with the label on his beer again. “Guess we got something in common.”

“Why’d you leave?”

Dean didn’t raise his eyes. “There’s nothing for me in Kansas.”

Danny levelled his eyes at him. “Doesn’t seem like there’s much for you anywhere, Dean.”

“Yeah, well. Wouldn’t be any of your damn business if there is or not.”

“I’m not trying to be rude here.” Danny sighed. “You just looked pretty damn lonely when you walked in here. And most guys who ain’t, then turn around and walk straight back out, you know? His eyes flickered downwards. “After a while, it gets to a person. Seeing nothing but misery day in, day out.”

“I’m no therapist, Danny.” Dean lifted the whiskey glass in something approximating a toast. “This right here is how I get through the tough times.”

“Does it work?” Danny asked, and Dean could sense real pain behind his words, then. He might have had problems on a larger scale than most, but it was too easy to forget that everyone else was struggling, too. Everyone had their demons, real or metaphorical. He shook his head.

“It doesn’t work worth a damn. But it’s easy enough to pretend that it does.”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

“I should have figured,” Danny said later, thirty minutes before closing time. Dean had completely lost track of how long he’d been sat there, talking about his feelings like a damn teenager with a total stranger. The hours had been oddly comforting in a way that his usual solitary drinking sessions never were. Could be he’d been looking for somebody to confide in all this time, someone who wasn’t tied in to the whole mess of him and Sam and the creatures they’d been hunting and killing their whole damn lives. “My dad was over there, too. Second battalion. Mama said he never was the same, after. Me and my sisters, we never knew him any other way.”

Dean’s eyes start to cloud over. He remembers, but just barely. There was a time when his life had been full of apple pies and sunshine. He has one clear memory; his mother cutting the crusts off of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich while he sat at the kitchen table, playing with the toy cars his daddy had bought for his last birthday. It had been summer, and she had been singing. Most everything else was swallowed up in the fire. “We did okay, the three of us. It wasn’t a bad way of living.”

“But I’ll bet it wasn’t good,” Danny said, and Dean pushed himself to his feet and stumbled to the men’s room.

While pissing he tried to count how many drinks he’d had, getting lost after six beers and three double whiskeys. It would be Friday in a couple of hours, and that meant back on the road. He had been stupid. He had taken his eyes off of the prize. In the morning he’d be sloppy and no good to kill any damn thing, maybe even no good to drive. He cursed as he zipped up and washed his hands, pausing to stare long and hard in the mirror at the flush rising in his cheeks.

“Listen, I gotta run,” he called over to Danny as he patted down his pockets for the essentials: cash, keys, phone. Knife still holstered at his ankle, flask of holy water against his hip in his jacket pocket. “Thanks, though. For the drinks, I guess. And, just…you know. Thanks.”

“Not long now till closing,” Danny said quietly, deliberately, and Dean noticed that they were now alone in the bar, just two empty glasses left on the table closest to the door. “If you wanted to wait.” From across the room his eyes fixed on Dean’s, and Dean noticed for the first time how clear and blue they were, piercing into his own. He blinked, trying to think back over their conversations that evening. He hadn’t picked up on any kind of vibe at all other than friendship, but he knew what Danny was really asking. His pulse quickened; he felt it in his throat. It had been a damn long time since he’d done anything like this, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to do it now.

“Maybe take a rain check,” he replied, and Danny smiled sadly.

“We both know there ain’t gonna be a next time. Just say no if you want to.”

Dean swallowed and wiped his palms on the front of his thighs, answering without thinking like he usually did.

“No, I mean, yeah. Yes. Sounds good.” He cleared his throat awkwardly, and Danny’s smile warmed up.

“Okay, then. Won’t be more than fifteen minutes.”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Those fifteen minutes passed in a blur as Dean slumped at a table, watching Danny running glasses through the machine to clean and wondering what he was doing there. Just because the guy had listened to him run his mouth, didn’t mean he owed him anything. But Dean knew it wasn’t about that. Not this time.

As Danny hit the switch that killed the lights above the bar, he snagged a bottle of Jim Beam on his way over to where Dean waited. “Give me a minute to get caught up,” he said, and drank straight from the bottle, then held a hand out for Dean to hoist himself to his feet. “Come on. My place isn’t far.”

“I’ve got a motel,” said Dean, but Danny shook his head.

“You don’t have to stay till morning if you don’t want to.”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Danny’s place was as bare bones as any apartment Dean had ever been inside. No pictures on the walls and barely any furniture. The living room was two mismatched chairs and an old television on a milk crate. Dean turned to him with a question in his eyes and Danny shrugged it off.

“This is temporary.”

“Right.”

“Mind if I smoke?” asked Danny, and Dean shook his head no. Danny opened one of the two small windows anyway and shook out a Marlborough from a crumpled pack on top of the television. He offered the pack to Dean, and after a beat, Dean took one. It had been a long time since he’d had a cigarette, too. Sam could be so damn preachy about shit like that. Always on at him to eat more vegetables.

Danny closed his eyes gratefully on the exhale. “I don’t smoke all day at the bar,” he said. “Usually there’s no one else there to cover me for breaks.”

Dean raised his eyebrows. “Do you eat?”

“Enough to get by,” Danny said with a wry smile. Dean noticed for the first time a hint of silver around his neck and, antsy with the knowledge of what was coming up and half wanting to get it over with, he reached out and brushed his fingers along Danny’s neck, pulling the chain free from beneath the layers of his clothes. Danny closed his eyes again and Dean ran his thumb along the thin edges of the military tags he had found.

“Your dad’s?”

“Yeah. About all I inherited from him, in the end.” Danny turned and reached out towards Dean himself, slow enough that Dean could have blocked him easily if he’d wanted to. He caught hold of the collar of Dean’s undershirt, knuckles cool against Dean’s throat. “There’s something missing here, isn’t there? Gift from your brother, maybe?”

Dean exhaled. “Shit, you’re good.”

“Sure am.” A pause, then, softer, “You want to find out how good, Dean?”

Dean nodded, fast, before he could change his mind. This wasn’t shaping up the way that his hook-ups normally did, but he was here. He was committed. Dean didn’t back out of things, ever. He stuck to his guns all the way.

Danny flicked his cigarette butt out of the window and Dean followed suit, watching the glowing orange tip arc out away from the building and to the pavement below. Danny’s hand came to rest on his shoulder, a reassuring weight that actually calmed him. He turned, lifting his head to look into the man’s blue eyes. Shit, but he was tall. Damn near as tall as Sam.

“Sure you’re good with this?” Danny said, searching Dean’s face. “I won’t ask again.”

“We’re done talking, Danny,” Dean said, voice low and roughened now. Then Danny was leaning in and Dean was closing his eyes and taking one last shaky breath before they were kissing.

Danny kissed him slowly, like he was still testing his limits. Dean wasn’t used to leaning upwards into a kiss, not at all, but when he felt strong hands wrapping around the jut of his hips he tilted his head back and moaned into it instinctively. Danny explored his mouth carefully with lips and teeth and tongue, and Dean let him, eyes closed and dizzy from the alcohol fuelling the blood pumping through his limbs and in a rush through his head.

Danny’s bedroom was just a wardrobe and a mattress on the floor and Danny stripped both of their clothes off before they lay down. Dean’s jeans got caught on the holster around his ankle, and when Danny saw the blade he didn’t flinch. He looked up at Dean sprawled against the pillows and stilled his hands and said “You can keep that on you, if you need to,” and Dean nodded once, a sharp jerk of his chin downwards.

Dean let himself be rolled to the side, Danny pressed up hot against his back, plastered along the whole length of his body with his hands sliding around and down, touching slowly. Dean looked out through the open doorway at the landing light that was still on, that didn’t quite reach into the corner of the bedroom where they lay  together, and thought about Kansas.

He opened up against Danny’s hands, arching against his body that lacked all of Dean’s own sharp bones and hard muscles, was just a little softer in places but still good enough, Danny with his broad, broad shoulders and blue, blue eyes. Just some anonymous guy who already knew more about Dean than he should. Some lonely, poor as shit bartender that Dean would never see again. At his motel, Dean would have put some music on, but Danny’s room didn’t even have a radio, so it was to the quiet sounds of their own slow breathing and traffic in the distance and the shifting of the sheets that Danny moved inside of him, to the wet sounds of their bodies against each other’s. And Danny never stopped going slowly, endlessly slowly, drawing every feeling out of Dean like loose threads that he was pulling on. Dean, with his eyes closed and his arms linked through Danny’s, holding on. Dean, letting himself be controlled. Still trying to forget who he was.

On top of Dean, his mouth against the flesh of his shoulder, Danny murmured, “You can say his name, if you need to.” Dean fought incredibly hard against the lump in his throat, the tears that wanted to crawl up from the burning in his chest to leak out of the corners of his eyes, Dean fought with everything in him, shaking and biting down through his orgasm, and Dean won.

His motel was only five blocks away but in the semi-darkness that had shadowed them both from the bar until that moment, in the heat and mess of skin and blankets, with too much whiskey spinning circles in his head and his body wrung out and exhausted, it was impossible to resist the dreamless, heavy sleep that claimed him just seconds later.

In the morning, really only four hours away, it stung a little when Dean dragged his jeans back on. His fingers twitched on his bootlaces and Danny brought him strong black coffee from the diner beneath his apartment. It was Friday, then. The sun was only just starting to rise.

“I have to go take inventory at the bar,” Danny said, and Dean nodded, not trusting his voice to work after so much alcohol combined with so little sleep. His head was still swimming.

He figured he’d be alright to drive in a couple of hours if he could just grab some more sleep back at the motel, this is what he thought about as he walked down the street with Danny, checking his pockets again for change, keys, weapons. All were still accounted for.

Outside of Joe’s Spot, Danny turned to him with a small smile, a nod of thanks. He said, “You should go call your brother, Dean.”

Dean jammed his hands into his hip pockets and said, “Not yet.”

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

It was six years later that Dean found himself face down against the cool metal of his car, an angel’s hand on his neck in a hospital parking garage in New York state, on the verge of losing every single thing that he had left until a voice interrupted the scene and the death blow never came.

After the fight, after Dean had jammed a blade hard through the son of a bitch’s rib cage, his own blade in fact, he saw his saviour slumped against a car that his body had broken the windows out of when he’d slammed into it. Dean looked at him and asked “Who are you?” like it was the first time an angel had saved his life when part of him didn’t want to be saved.

The clear blue eyes that met his seemed familiar somehow, and even before he got a name out of him, before the holy fire just as a precaution and the angel warding and the beginning of the whole mess, Dean felt like he’d met another angel that he could trust. In the back of his mind, like an itch that he couldn’t reach, he felt as if they had met before.

It must have been a long time ago, he thought, and brushed it away.

**Author's Note:**

> So you guys got that the bartender was Gadreel’s vessel, right? Okay, cool.
> 
> I picked Somerset, Pennsylvania as the location of the bar because it’s where Gadreel is in 9x10 Road Trip. I wanted to set this during a time when it feasibly maybe could have happened, and definitely a time when Sam and Dean were separated, so for that reason I picked 5x03 Free To Be You And Me. Then I found out that Dean was actually in Pennsylvania at the start of that episode and flipped out with excitement. THEN after I wrote the whole thing I checked Google Maps and found out that Greeley and Somerset are like 200 miles apart. Why is America so big?? But in this fic I’m pretending they’re next to each other. Shhhh. So this is supposed to happen during the montage at the start of 5x03. I’m pretending that there’s a couple days gap between Dean icing the vamps and Cas appearing in his motel room. So yes. Hope you enjoyed it :)


End file.
